Biography | Geert Dancet — The Cloth Hall Where a Louvain Economist Began

People who meet Geert Dancet as the first director of a chemicals agency tend to skip the first classroom.

He was not trained as a chemist.

Official Commission and Parliament biographies record that he studied economics, econometrics and philosophy at the University of Louvain in Belgium.

A German biographical summary places the start of those studies in 1975 and an assistant-professor post at the same university from 1978 to 1981.

The university's public face on this street is the Universiteitshal at Naamsestraat 22.

The Gothic cloth hall became the university's seat in the fifteenth century and remains the ceremonial and administrative heart of KU Leuven.

The Faculty of Economics and Business now teaches a few doors uphill at Naamsestraat 69.

A visitor looking for the 1970s economics faculty will not find a separate plaque with Dancet's name.

What still stands is the hall that marked the university he joined, and the slope of colleges that still carries the faculty.

After the assistant years he left for a two-year UNIDO programme post in Bogotá.

In 1986 he entered the European Commission in Brussels and spent most of the next two decades in competition and enterprise policy.

The Louvain years explain the later oddity.

When REACH needed a first director in Helsinki, the file went to an economist rather than a laboratory chemist.

The chemicals brief found him later.

The first discipline was here.

Photo: Frie Van Grunderbeeck, 13 September 2011, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons